Amid new guidelines, Va. woman’s deportation case comes down to the last minute
She had spent her final week praying for one outcome while preparing for another.
With five days left before she was supposed to leave the United States, Paula Godoy explained to her three children what it meant to be deported. With three days left, she packed her clothes and rosary beads into a makeshift suitcase. With two days left, she arranged to live in Guatemala with the only relative still there, a distant uncle whom she would identify at the airport by his orange Hawaiian shirt.
And on the last day, Godoy awoke next to her boyfriend in their Richmond apartment and confessed she had all but given up hope.
“There’s no time,” she told him. “We need a miracle now.”
Godoy had thought she might be given a last-minute reprieve based on the government’s new deportation guidelines, which were put into place last month. Faced with 11 million illegal immigrants and limited funds with which to remove them, President Obama’s administration announced it would focus only on deporting the worst of the worst while dismissing cases against people such as Godoy, who have clean records and long histories in the United States.
The government said it plans to reconsider the status of 300,000 illegal residents under the new guidelines, including many who already received deportation orders. But sometimes in Washington, a solution isn’t necessarily a fix. Even with the guidelines in place, there is no way for illegal immigrants to apply for review, and the government has yet to announce which cases will be reevaluated, when, and by whom. The new guidelines are not a law or a bill or even a policy; they are a suggestion that will be interpreted day-by-day, case-by-case.
One of those cases was Godoy’s. “I just need an answer,” she said.
A life in Richmond? Or a morning flight out of Dulles, already confirmed by deportation officials?
Twenty-four hours left to determine her fate…